Study Finds ‘Climate Change’ Stopped The Next Ice Age — Why Aren’t We Celebrating?

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” — Greta Thunberg, United Nations, Sept. 23, 2019.

Here’s a question someone should ask climate expert Greta Thunberg today. What if global warming is preventing the next ice age? Wouldn’t that be a good thing for children everywhere?

Turns out, a new study published in the highly respected journal Science says that might be exactly what’s happening right now.

The study, which goes by the unassuming title of “Late Holocene re-expansion of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,” asks whether “anthropogenic warming prevented the next glacial cycle” and finds that “it may have done just that.”

The researchers looked at the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), which covered much of North America at the peak of the last ice age, and began retreating nearly 12,000 years ago in what is called today’s Holocene period (the Great Lakes were carved out by the retreat of this ice sheet).

What they found was that “after shrinking throughout much of the early- and mid-Holocene, the LIS began to grow again around 2,000 years ago but then began shrinking once more around 1960. The authors attribute this reversal to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing, evidence that humans caused the termination of the next glaciation,” writes Science’s Jesse Smith in the “Editor’s summary.” (Emphasis added.)

Nicolás Young, a geochemist at the Columbia Climate School and one of the study’s authors, put it in layman’s terms, telling Phys.org that: “It was just getting started, everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen — and yet it stopped.” (The University of Colorado Boulder called it “The failed ice age.”)

The fact that a new glacial period had begun should not be a surprise to anyone who knows anything about the history of ice ages.

The climate record shows that ice ages are a recurring phenomenon that last far longer than “interglacial” periods like the one we are in right now (80,000 years vs. 10,000 years, roughly). And global temperatures during previous interglacials were far higher than today’s “hottest year on record.” The chart below shows this in dramatic fashion.

Scientists also know that the next ice age would be catastrophic for mankind, threatening, among other things, mass starvation as cropland shrinks.

What’s more, the current interglacial is now more than 11,700 years old. Which means we are due for another ice age in the relatively near future.

In fact, back in the 1970s, some scientists were predicting the onset of the next ice age. (Time magazine ran an article on June 24, 1974, titled “Another Ice Age?” Newsweek ran a feature article on April 28, 1975, titled “The Cooling World” in which it said that “The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard pressed to keep up with it.”)

Climate types later dismissed those ice age fears as unfounded. But, as the Phys.org article puts it:

The findings [in the Science study] are also a coda for climate scientists who in the 1970s made the controversial claim that a new ice age was imminent. ‘It actually was happening,’ Young says. ‘They couldn’t quite prove it, but now we sort of have the evidence.’

So, if these researchers are right, the carbon emissions that climate zealots want stopped appear to have halted, or at least put off, the next ice age.

Shouldn’t this be cause for celebration? And shouldn’t we be encouraging everyone to keep burning as much fossil fuel as possible for as long as possible? And shouldn’t Greta Thunberg, when she’s not too busy pimping for Hamas terrorists, apologize to future generations for her “how dare you” speech?

More likely we will start hearing about how stopping the next ice age is an even worse environmental catastrophe.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Support Independent Journalism

Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists from the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day -- without fear or favor.

We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we believe in a free press and because we aren't afraid to tell the truth, even if it means being targeted by the left.

We are 100% reader supported!!

If you like what you see, please feel free to donate.

And be sure to tell your friends!